That our healthcare system is a source of fright for many isn’t anything new. it’s a dreaded rites of passage nearly to be left propped up on a trolley in a corridor as the numbers stuck waiting for bed reach an all-time high. Paul Dillon talks to the people that have turned tracking trolleys into one of the main statistical tropes of the crisis in our healthcare system about why … Read More

Keep the Pump Going Fella! Shane Ross spent most of his career in the Seanad and in Independent newspapers. He was elected to the Dail for the fi rst time in 2011, in Ireland’s recession election. It was rumoured he would run on a slate with the likes of Fintan O’Toole, David McWilliams and Eamon Dunphy. This never came to pass. Once in the Dail, he developed his anti establishment … Read More

A woman kneels on a bed, as onlookers observe. Her face is twisted, she emits a guttural bellowing, grunts, thumps herself and spouts expletive-riddled abuse. Primal Screaming doesn’t look like much of a buzz but Caitriona Devery decided to take a plunge into the strange anyway.

This was not the first time barricades had dotted Parisian streets, but what was different about 1968 was the immediate international coverage of events. To students elsewhere, it showed the way. In Dublin, the ‘Internationalists’ of Trinity College Dublin, a small Maoist student body with influence beyond their numbers, disrupted the visit to the university by King Baudouin of Belgium.

The experience of the Italian Communist Party has much to teach us, and we are of course very proud of that heritage, dating back to the resistance, but at the same time our world is now very different, and we must find our own responses to the problems of today.

The concept of public service broadcasting isn’t really a coherent blueprint for broadcasting practice. Rather is a rather vague concept based on a particular set of institutional arrangements and a particular coalition of class interests. In practical terms what it has meant is that the public interest has been defined largely by people drawn from the upper middle classes who operate in a subordinate relationship to the state.

“There’s a constant effort at balancing the interests. However there are fundamental contradictions in the interests of the tenants and the landlords. The landlord’s aim is to raise rent to make more money out of it and then the tenants aim is to have a secure place to live. This is playing out with slum landlords illegally evicting people using a high level of threat and violence, sending round heavies. RTB can’t really deal with that complex of a case or that level of force being applied by the landlord.”

The Government has recently seen fit to admit AirBnb is a massive problem with regards to the housing crisis. However, Eoghan Murphy has already claimed that any regulations will probably only apply to Dublin – this is even more shortsighted than you’d think. Patrick McCusker got looking at the facts to explore just how bad an influence AirBnb really is having outside Dublin.

We were frustrated at the polarised, un-analytical, stop watch style of broadcasting around the Repeal referendum. The interpretation of the broadcasting rules means that two sides are being pitted against each other in debates that don’t lend themselves to thoughtful, meaningful conversations.